“Drawing became a weapon” Ralph Steadman on his Gonzo life with Hunter S Thompson

The first words Hunter Thompson ever wrote about Ralph Steadman were filled
with foreboding: "All I knew about him was that this was his first
visit to the United States. And the more I pondered the fact, the
more it gave me fear. How would he bear up under the heinous
culture shock of being lifted out of London and plunged into the
drunken mob scene at the Kentucky Derby? There was no way of
knowing."

That was in 1970, when Scanlan's Monthly decided to
pair Thompson not with a photographer but with an illustrator
already known for his vicious eye for satire. The piece they
created together, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved",
became the world's first taste of "Gonzo journalism". It was the
start of a partnership that would go on to produce 35 years of
brilliant and iconoclastic work, including Steadman's intense and
visceral illustrations for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
and a whole series of lurid Rolling Stone covers.

When we meet on London's Southbank, Steadman is on the hunt for
Sauvignon Blanc. We're here to talk about For No Good
Reason, an honest and candid documentary about his life and
work that he's put together with the help of Johnny Depp and the filmmaker Charlie Paul. The conversation
soon turns to powerful hallucinogenic drugs, why America's "heinous
culture shock" was the best thing that ever happened to him and the
true meaning of Gonzo.

GQ: You say in For No Good Reason that
you want to use your art to bring about social change. Where did
that impulse come from? Ralph Steadman: Well, that was the bulls*** I used! I
actually did want to change the world. I decided that I wasn't just
going to be an advertiser. I had worked for an advertising agency,
I had worked in Woolworths and I had worked for de Havilland
Aircraft Company, where I was going to be an engineer. That all
went out the window. I took a course when I was doing my national
service. I saw an advert for Percy V Bradshaw's Press Arts
School Course. It read, "You too can learn to draw and earn
£££s." It was a bit of an old fashioned course, but it got me
going. I started sending pictures to the Aberdeen Journal,
the Leicester Mercury and the Manchester Evening
Chronicle. The very first cartoon I had published was at the
time of the Suez crisis. It was a loch keeper sitting in his chair
looking at a newspaper and saying, "Nasser, who's he?" It seems
rather a long time ago now. All those guys are gone and I'm still
here.

Having lived through the events of The Kentucky
Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, were you surprised when you
first read the piece?I was quite flattered to read what he'd said. "Waiting for
Steadman…" became one of our things! He invited me to meet some of
his old friends. There was a girl there and I started drawing her.
She says, "I'm purdy, aren't I? You ain't drawn me purdy! Why
aren't I purdy?" I said, "Well, you have a go. Draw me." She went
crazy with anger because she couldn't get anything down without a
scribble. That's when Hunter said, "Stop doing those filthy
scribblings, Ralph! You'll get us thrown out." He took me to the
airport and threw me out. I think he says I was half-naked at the
time. I wasn't really, but Hunter embroidered the truth. It was
truth and it wasn't truth. Hunter told me I'd lost it, and I didn't
think he'd ever invite me back. I didn't think Scanlon's
would either, but then they did.

After the Kentucky Derby you went to cover the America's
Cup yacht race together… That's the one! That's the only time I took drugs.
Psilocybin. If I'd have completed what I thought I was going to do
I'd never have left America. Hunter had got these spray cans. I
said, "Why did you bring those along?" He said, "I don't know. I
thought maybe we could use them." We had a few drinks in the bar in
Rhode Island. Hunter had a Lille flare gun with him. He kept that
on him, "You never know when you might need a thing like this." We
had drinks then went back on the rowing boat to the three-masted
schooner we were staying on. Then we took off in the boat, me with
the spray-cans and Hunter trying to row. The oars were coming out
of the rollicks. I can seem him now, with his legs in the air.
"F*** this goddamn boat. Hurry up and do the job!" I was to write
"F*** the Pope" on the side of one of the boats. It was the Gretel
and the Intrepid. They were beautiful things, worth £500,000 each.
If I'd done it I don't think they'd have let me leave America.
Luckily we were caught. Someone had shouted down, "Excuse me, what
are you doing down there?" Hunter said, "Oh, we're just looking at
the boats." Unbeknown to them was what I was planning under the
influence of that drug. Luckily I didn't do it. It makes a better
story than it felt in actuality at the time. It was terrible.

I remember getting a plane back to New York and for some reason
I wouldn't sit down for the whole journey. At the time you could
smoke and walk around, there wasn't security like there is now. I
just refused to sit down. I got back to New York and I remembered
I'd met a lady in Italy who'd said, "If you're ever in New York…" I
remember ringing her and saying: "I've just been on this terrible
journey with Hunter." I went to see her and she got me a doctor. He
put me out for 24 hours. I'd got myself into a bit of a state. It's
weird that Jann Wenner says I'm crazier than Hunter. It's not
true.

George Plimpton met you and Hunter in Kinshasa when you
were all there to cover Muhammad Ali's "Rumble In The Jungle". He
wrote: "[Ralph] seems to pep things up, and inspire a corporate
rather than an individual madness". That's rather a good quote, isn't it! Dear old George
Plimpton. I mean, everybody was there. There was a queue of all the
greatest names you've ever heard of from the journalists of the
time. They were all queuing to get out of Kinshasa. That was
surreal. I don't know if anyone got any film of that line of great
journalists.

But Hunter didn't finish the story. Rolling
Stone editor Paul Scanlon told us you were very angry, because that meant
they didn't use your pictures. Did you worry Hunter had lost it at
that point?
No, they didn't use them and I'd done all these pictures! Hunter
was still producing, in a way he was just about to begin. I think I
was a bit upset because I considered it to be one's duty to fulfil
the assignment. That was important. I went out there always with a
sense of responsibility. I'd get as crazy as I could but I'd do the
job. I did what I was being paid to do, or not paid to do. Half the
time I never got paid, but it was something to do.

Were you more reliable than Hunter?
He had to see the work before he could write anything. Then he
said to me, "Don't write, Ralph. You'll bring shame on your
family." I did the drawings first. He used to say he'd "get off the
back of them." "You do something, Ralph, anything. I'll write after
that."

In 1980 you worked together on The Curse Of
Lono book, the only time you shared equal credit. How did that
come about?
With him saying, "Ralph, we've got to go join the marathon." I
spent some time in Honolulu and thought there was a book there
somewhere.Hunter wanted to call it The Hawaiian Diaries. I
thought that was a boring title. I'd heard about Lono, this god
figure rowing away into the distance across the sea. I suddenly
thought: Hunter's the god Lono. Hunter was always on about the
curse of things, so I thought: "We'll call it The Curse Of
Lono." I did the drawings first. Hunter wanted to hang them
up, so he pinned them up all around in Owl Farm and wrote with them
as a background. We split the credit on that one.

What did you think when you were first sent the
manuscript for Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas?
I recognised the process. He was with his "Samoan lawyer". In some
ways I'd been dropped. I think he wanted to go with somebody who
could represent him if he got into difficulties. The Samoan lawyer
was more useful than the mad "English" artist. I couldn't argue
with that. He'd already done it, anyway. He'd taken off in this
car, but I knew exactly what it was like to do it when I drew the
illustrations like the hitchhiker. The art intrudes over the text.
There's someone leaning on the letter 'E', sort of a Kentuckian.
That was a nice thing to think about and work on. I think
Rolling Stone were quite trailblazing at the time. It was
a hell of a good thing. The best thing I did was go to America in
1970. I found out about things that weren't in your local
paper.

Did going to America also give you an enemy to
fight?
I hated Nixon so much. I felt it was my duty to destroy him
somehow. Drawing became a weapon. If I had a long nib I could have
stabbed him with it, but instead I had to do it on paper. In some
ways, drawing has always been for me a very real alternative to
violence. "The only thing of value is the thing you cannot say."
Wittgenstein said that. That's true, but you can draw it. Drawing
can, sometimes, in just a few lines say what you'd want to say in a
long paragraph.

What's your proudest achievement?
I think I Leonardo is the most comprehensive set of
pictures I've ever done. It was very personal. It meant a lot to
me, to do. I did a book about God as well, called The Big I
Am. That was quite interesting.I was able to play God, just as
I had "become" Leonardo. When I did a book about Sigmund Freud I
was lying down on the floor in his actual consulting room, looking
up at the ceiling and imagining what it was like to have him
standing above you. That all became part of the book. I think
process is really quite important when you're doing anything.

That's a very Gonzo idea, to place yourself inside the
story.
You become the story. That's what Hunter always liked the idea of
best. Don't stand back and do it like an official bank clerk
filling in a form. You're actually creating the story as you go.
There is no story, until you start one. That's how we did it.
That's why it always was fun. That's why it was hopeless when he
killed himself.

How did you learn he'd died?
It was from my friend Joe Petro III, a screenprinter from
Louisville, Kentucky. He rang up in the middle of the night on
February 20th, 2005. He said, "Take your phone off the
hook, Ralph. Hunter's just committed suicide." It was… a downer. I
think it's remained so, although I'm still doing my own thing. I've
been thinking what a dimension to my life Hunter has been. I
couldn't imagine living life without the kind of stimulus that came
from him. People are still interested in Hunter the man, crazy man
that he was. He was physically big. Enormous. He had a head like a
lump of granite.

Do you have any regrets?
You can't. It's past! It's gone. No regrets. The best thing I did
was go to America and get work from Scanlan's magazine in
New York. Scanlan was a little-known Nottingham pig farmer - that's
how it got the name. Their whole quest was to impeach Nixon. I went
along with that idea.

In the end, did you change the world? I think the world is worse now than when we started.
That's really what happened. It's awful now.